2011 - Theses - Flinders University

White Lives in a Black Community: The lives of Jim Page and Rebecca Forbes in the Adnyamathanha communityTracy SpencerVolume One Creative Writing Component: Excerpted Chapters from Volume Three Appendix OneState Records of South Australia, Netley, Adelaide 2003The level of surveillance exercised over yuras in the 1950s astounded me. District police, theeyes and ears of the government since the era of local ‘Protectors’ of Aborigines, sendmonthly reports to Mr Penhall detailing the employment, travel arrangements, romanticattachments and marital status of Indigenous people in their district. The people they writeabout have done nothing to attract the attention of the Law, apart from having any degree ofIndigenous heritage. Huge amounts of government time and money have been spentglorifying gossip about people’s personal lives. It is from this evidence, however, how I learnwhen John leaves the talc mines, rejects the job at Myrtle Springs MC Geary has lined up forhim, and instead takes a position on Mt Lyndhurst Station. 218 He can find his own work, buthe can’t visit his own mother without government permission.Nepabunna, June 1950Kitty Elliot’s death came as a shock to Mrs Forbes, although, she thought to herself, it shouldnot have. When Kitty’s brother Albert Wilton had passed away, it felt like the end of an era.But the deaths of old Kitty’s children within the year, and then Alick Ryan straightafterwards, had sent shivers and whispers through the camps. They had been such staunchChristians, all of them, even in the eery silence of the mulkara grounds last Christmas. Thedeaths, like the shrugs and rumblings of the country itself, shift time around Mrs Forbes. Shefeels older now, and at each funeral is overwhelmed by the gaping absences along the pews.She does not walk all the way to the new cemetery, where Mathari and Arruru are buriedtogether, ‘so that the old men and their wives can rest in peace together’ as Eaton says, but150